55. The Little Things

"Every day I spend here on earth is one day closer to being with you in Heaven."
~Anonymous

There's this thing in the Army called the Soldier Fitness Tracker: Strong Minds! Strong Bodies! that I'm required to complete every year. There are about 103.7333 annual online requirements of this aggravating type, and the SFT is just one of them. It's also referred to as the GAT (Global Assessment Tool) and it's a computer program that asks you a bunch of multiple choice questions before categorizing your answers into four areas of overall Soldier fitness: Emotional, Social, Family, and Spiritual. You even get a colored status bar for each category - green is good, amber means you need improvement in that area, and red means you face some significant challenges in that area (i.e. you have a lot of work to do). Guess who got red bars for both emotional and spiritual....oh yeah - this girl! Encouraging, right? And it wasn't like I was trying to "fail." I was just being honest (a novel concept, I know). Maybe I should tell whoever made up that test that getting red-barred makes me even less confident about my well-being than I was before answering their silly questions...

I guess the good news is that my overall scores in social and family health went up a little. Again, not so surprising, however, is the fact that my emotional and spiritual scores either decreased or stayed about the same since I took the test last year. The program also gives you the option of comparing your scores to others in various categories, including gender, component status, rank, marital status, etc. Lo and behold, when it comes to comparing my stats to those in the same marital status category (i.e. widowed), there are only 1,368 of all the hundreds of thousands of people surveyed who fall into the same group as me. Compare that to the number of individuals I'm compared against in any other category (gender - female: 202,602; rank - Captain: 47,515; age - 27: 61,061, etc.) and it's easy to see why it's lonely to be in this teeny tiny little category in which I find myself.

One of many "cute cliches" (though I hope it's true....)

It's the little things like this test that creep up and get you when you let your guard down for a moment. The same day I took that test, I went to a baseball game with some people from work. I watched couples laugh together as they sat with their arms around one another and parents buy their cute little kids snow cones and popcorn. As I drove home, I thought about how I'd do anything to feel Jon's arm around me again. When we walked together, he always used to say how I fit perfectly under his arm. I thought about what I'd do just to hold his hand. His hands were the same size as mine. We discovered this on our second date at the movie The Hunted when we held hands for the first time. As we walked out of the theater, the first thing he said to me was "so, you realize your hands are the same size as mine right?" Yup, that's me - big man hands (and big feet too). And what I wouldn't do to hear him say my name again...I always loved the way it sounded when he'd come in the door at the end of the day and say my name or refer to me as his wife.

One of the many questions on that Army survey asked if I'm afraid or fearful on a daily basis. The honest answer is yes. I'm fearful of the future and what it will hold for me without Jon in it. I'm fearful of finding myself isolated and far from family and friends when big Army makes its decision in a couple of years about where to send me for my first assignment. I'm fearful of living a long life and missing Jon this much until the day I die. I'm fearful of never having the courage to follow through with my plan to adopt a baby and give that child a better life because parenting is scary enough - life as a single parent is downright terrifying. I'm fearful of losing the other people in my life who keep me company and distract me from the loneliness that comes hand-in-hand with the widow territory. And I'm fearful of the fact that people will think I didn't love Jon enough because I tried to find happiness by dating other people too soon after losing my husband. Sometimes I wonder if the things I do and say now are motivated subconsciously by the fact that I think I have something to prove to myself in that regard. Am I trying - without even realizing it - to apologize for the fact that I made some stupid mistakes in how I went about filling the void of Jon's absence? I've asked myself this question many times, though I'm afraid of the answer. I'm even more afraid of someone else giving me an honest-to-goodness, no B.S. answer without worrying about hurting my feelings. Which brings me to yet another thing I fear, silly though I'm sure it seems: Sometimes when I have one of those nights where I sniffle, hate life, and sit alone feeling miserable (and yes, there may be more than a little self-pity involved), I don't have enough energy to pick up the phone because I see all the numbers of people I could call and get overwhelmed by the thought of having to figure out which one to pick. Funny how something that's really a good thing can become so stressful and seem so scary.

So yes, there are a lot of things that I fear, which is why it makes me laugh even more when people comment on how "strong" I seem on the outside. If I weren't so squeamish, maybe I should have gone into medicine instead of law? Being around death and sickness on a daily basis might make this all seem a little less traumatic. When I visited with an old college friend who I hadn't seen in a while the other day, he made a good point about Jon's loss in relation to time - he said that perhaps it actually gets harder, if anything, as time goes on and people drift away. People tend to forget that just because Jon didn't die two months ago and I handle things differently now than I did at his funeral doesn't mean it doesn't still hurt like hell. He told me it's okay to be sad...and to always be sad about all of this, especially since, in his words, our friends agreed when they heard the news of Jon's death that it could not have happened to a worse person. 


I think, in a way, it helped to hear him say these things; his straight-forward honesty made much more of an impression than when I try to feed myself happy go-lucky thoughts in an effort to change my mood. Every morning before I get out of bed, I read inspiring messages like "follow your dreams - dream big" and "what's meant to be will always find a way," but the cynic in me can't help but snicker a little at some of these sentiments. Sometimes it's the blunt and less sugar-coated messages that speak far louder volumes than the cute cliches. And it's the old stories and the happy memories that make me laugh, not the overly optimistic phrases about having faith and looking forward to the future, blah blah blah. So bring on the stories and the memories. The people who come into my life now and never had the opportunity to meet Jon may think it's weird that I still talk about "my husband" so much, but like my old friend said, who cares what they think? I may even lose friends over it because it makes people uncomfortable (as has been the case in the past), but I guess that's just another casualty of this whole process. It's the little things, like the funny Jon-isms, that keep me going...and make me who I am. So, to borrow from one of the cute cliches for a moment, "dream as big as you want to - and don't let the limited thinking of others stop you, for love has a way of lifting us up."

Jon and I being silly a few months after we started dating back in 2003 - God, how I miss those times and that sweet, funny face...I love you so much, baby.